Emotional Sobriety and Duct Tape

The other night at a meeting, a guy I'll call Jim shared his misadventure with his cell phone. It seems the battery panel wasn't holding the phone's battery in any more. Wanting to save some money on a replacement phone, he purchased one on Craiglist.

Alas, phone number 2 does not work, and as the reader can guess, the merchant is nowhere to be found for a refund. Angrily, he duct-taped the battery panel onto the original phone and stormed out of his house to a meeting, where many shared about how to make lemons when life hands us lemonade (or whatever non-alcoholic beverage you would make with a blackberry).

I asked him how his phone worked with the duct tape. Great! he enthused. So I asked, why did he buy a replacement phone when the duct tape fixed the problem?


"Because I didn't want people to think I couldn't afford a new phone."

On the surface, it looks like this guy's problem is scammers on Craigslist, but I think he has a part to play in his own misery.

Jim purchased the replacement phone out of pride. The duct tape solved the problem, but he wanted others to be impressed with his new gadget, and maybe therefore with Jim himself.  He wants life to improve based on an external condition: the ownership of a cooler-than-yours phone.  To make matters worse, Jim can't afford a new phone, so when he started prowling Craigslist, he did it to bolster a false image to others!

If Jim wanted to save time, money, and emotion, he could have adopted a grateful attitude for a cell phone that's working with such a simple fix. No Craigslist drama!

I know it's wrong to sell bad stuff to people - I get that. But "anger is the dubious luxury of normal men", and I am not normal. I need to focus every ounce of emotional energy into my sobriety.  I don't have the luxury of spending any of it on Craigslist crime, or whether or not people will think less of me if I have duct tape on the back of my phone.

Giving Freely

"We make a living from what we get. We make a life from what we give." - Sir Winston Churchill

At my home group, we have a woman who brings a homemade lunch for the entire group almost every Tuesday. No one has asked her to do this, but everyone heartily digs in and lavishes her with thanks.

She is also a raging Al-Anon. Her husband still drinks heartily, and most weeks her catering is attached to sharing about how much people love what she does for them.

She has taken a job that requires her to be out-of-town for two weeks at a time. Yesterday she was back from her first tour of duty, and since she had been working, did not bring food. No one expressed any dismay.

The chairperson of the meeting called on folks to share, instead of having people just jump in. He did not call on her until the end of the meeting. She said this (loudly):

"I haven't been at a meeting for two weeks! I didn't come to have the chairperson call on people! I wanted to pick the topic of the meeting, something that's upsetting me! This wouldn't have happened if I'd brought food!"

And with that, she stormed out.

My immediate reaction to this mini-rant was that this meeting is not about her, but about a disease everyone in this room shares. As I thought about it though, I realized she might suffer from something a little deeper: giving of herself, but not freely. I suspect she feels entitled to select the topic of the meeting because she feeds people.

My old thinking told me that if I did something for you, bought you something or provided any other service, you owed me. I gave, and so should I get. You can bet that if you did not reciprocate in the manner I felt was appropriate, I got a resentment. I quit doing things for you, and more that likely you appeared somewhere on my list.

Sobriety doesn't hold up to scorekeeping or the anger, self-pity and resentment that follows it. Now, I give things without expecting anything in return. If I bring donuts to a meeting and you eat one, you don't owe me anything.

Nor do I owe you anything if I eat the donuts you bring, either. I assume that your motives for providing something to us are pure.

I will find out soon enough if they aren't.

Keep Others Simple ... For Yourself

I hear and read a lot about "change" that will now sweep over our nation. Apparently we have all been living in downtrodden misery, and a new president is going to fix Everything (he could start over here by taking a look at my bathtub plumbing, but somehow I doubt he's got me on his book).

When I was drinking, I blamed everyone and everything else for my problems. My blurry bottom line was that life just wasn't treating me right. If life treated me right, I wouldn't drink!

The amazing thing was that I developed peace with life once I stopped drinking and learned through a program of recovery that life treats me the way it treats everyone else: if I'm a jerk, people retaliate.

I once heard this in a meeting, "If in the course of a day, I meet one person that I suspect is an ***hole, there is a chance that I am right about that person. But when everyone I meet is an ***hole, then I am actually the ***hole."

I thought life was about being happy. I was wrong. Life is about taking the personal responsibility to contribute to the world. Once I become a giving member of society, I stand a greater chance of personal satisfaction and sobriety.

That's the change I believe in.

Day 6

Little to report on Day 6 besides digesting yesterday's mini-lightning bolt.

"This is a sick man. God save me from being angry." - The BB

Day 5

Last night I was studying "More About Alcoholism" in the BB w/my sponsor when I had an epiphany about P.

It happened when I read this sentence: "In some circumstances we have gone out deliberately to get drunk, feeling ourselves justified by nervousness, anger, worry, depression, jealousy or the like." I immediately thought of her going back out over her breakup with my ex. Frankly, I empathized with her at that moment, not because I thought drinking was a good idea, but I have certainly done such things in the past myself.

So why haven't I had any compassion for her?

And I realized I haven't had an compassion for her because she hasn't asked for any. She has always come flouncing in to meetings like her drama just didn't happen. She has never once shared with anyone (to my knowledge) that she is in spiritual pain, and she needs help. If she expressed that, I would feel some sympathy for her.

So the question for me is, do I have to wait for her?